We knew this was coming, but missed the announcement in July of Ricoh's GPS WiFi camera. This strikes us as something that can become a high-impact journalism tool. Imagine how it could be applied for covering mass demonstrations or even sporting events. It could also be great for travel stories — everything from walking tours through Scotland to pub crawling in New Orleans — when linked to Google Maps.

The opening day price is about $1,100. Not too much, we think, as an investment for a newroom's digital R&D person/team. (Those do exist, don't they?)

The continuing growing popularity of mapping (particularly Google Maps, Google Earth and their street views) and GPSRicoh 500SE Digital Camera that is GPS enabled. Take a photo with the 500SE and it automatically embeds the position info into the photo. In a year or so, this will probably become a pretty standard feature on digital cameras and camcorders, or at least highly coveted. solutions means that consumers will want more products that automatically tie those things together. Enter the

The Ricoh 500SE is no slouch in the camera department either. It is an 8 megapixel CCD, 3x optical zoom, large 2.5″ TFT LCDWiFiBluetooth 2.0 connectivity.

Now back to the GPS stuff. Just imagine how cool it would be to embed your photos automatically in the right spot on a map by adding them as layers to existing maps that have GIS capabilities. Well, nevermind the last part if you don’t get that. Think about how cool it would be if you could pull up your pics in Flikr, Gallery or whatever, and then display a map alongside it that shows where the pic was taken. monitor screen, SD card slot, camera shake blur reduction and a 28mm wide-angle zoom lens. It also comes with 802.11b/g and